Is New Zealand's "she'll be right" attitude costing the country?

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Brexit: Two weeks until…

On 29 March 2019, people the world over will watch the United Kingdom and European Union to see how Brexit unfolds. They will be watching something that British Prime Minsiter David Cameron, when he decided to put this to the vote in 2013, would have never envisaged happening. Mr Cameron would have been thinking no one will vote “LEAVE”. This was confirmed by his resignation from Parliament within a matter of weeks following the referendum.

Now, more than 2 years after that fateful day on which the vote to leave was held, Britain is teetering ever closer to the completely unknown. It has two weeks to figure out whether it wants a future, potentially crippled by E.U. restrictions; is going to call a hastily organized referendum on whether to continue or reverse course; or hastily rejoin. It has two weeks for Prime Minister Theresa May to salvage a deal from a field of wreckage from previous attempts at achieving a deal.

Twoweeks.

But can it? Former Mayor of London, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and favourite of the British right wing, Boris Johnson has always been stridently in favour of just walking away from the European Union. The problem with this approach is aside from being criminally reckless, it is a major middle finger salute to the international and domestic laws, the treatises and other instruments of law that define the basis of the western legal system.

What does Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the U.K. Labour Party want? As a past Eurosceptic, Mr Corbyn has not always been warm to the idea of Britain continuing a leading role in the E.U. It was not until Mr Cameron put the issue of whether to stay or go to a vote that Mr Corbyn seriously swung in behind it. He has said that if Britain leaves the E.U. it cannot remain in the European Single Market. Mr Corbyn has stated many times that the E.U. imposes rules on British employers that would cramp their ability to trade. And despite protests from various members of his Labour caucus, Mr Corbyn has not seriously committed to a second referendum.

There is not much New Zealanders or anyone else in Europe living in the U.K. can do except watch the whole thing unravel and hope that cometh 29 March there are no major problems.

The only economic reassurance is that New Zealand would be high on the British list in terms of priority for a new trade deal should Brexit trigger.

Will Brexit be clean? If I had to guess, highly improbable if not outright impossible. There are simply too many unknowns in what looks like a horrendously complex calculus equation. The deal Mrs May is offering is quite shoddy, but now, short of a hard exit, the cold truth is that the U.K. Parliament and the European Union might have no choice but to accept it.

I have concerns. One of them is that the border between Ireland and the rest of the European Union will become a hard border with check points and guards, and that this might stoke any tensions still existing. What will it mean for other borders and the Chunnel (Channel Tunnel), the Schengen free travel zone and so forth? Good question.

With only two weeks until God knows what happens next, I am only confident that all of this must be starting to play on a fair few millions of peoples nerves both in New Zealand, in the U.K., in the E.U. and around the world.